Tips To Increasing Confidence

Confidence is a very attractive trait and I believe it’s something that is essential in creating more success in your life. Confidence is also pretty useful in helping you to get more of what you want in life. Because the confident person isn’t afraid to go out and get it!!

Do you ever look at people and think to yourself, ‘I wish I could be that confident’?

I know I used to, and often I still do, you see I am a natural introvert, I naturally want to be shy, quiet, hide out at the back of a group. The thought of doing an introduction in a group setting used to fill me with dread and fear, you could here the nerves in my voice.

And while age and experience have obviously brought me a long way there are many other tools that I use to help me improve my own self-confidence, because like a muscle confidence can strengthen with practice.

As I moved over to France the natural introvert in me starts to show up again, especially when it comes to me speaking French.

I am pretty rubbish when it comes to languages, I got an F in French at school when I moved here the extent of my French was to say Bonjour, Aurevoir and to be able to count to 10!! Yeah I know, and I decided to move here!!

So, I know I wanted to learn to speak the language, but I kept on putting it off, procrastinating, finding other things that I would tell myself were more important than sitting down and doing a French lesson.

This month as I created my 90-day goals, learning to speak French was on there.

Because I want to gain more confidence in speaking a language because it’s just going to make life easier right?? There are so many English people in Morzine it’s far too easy to just not bother but as I had to go into school last week to check up on something, I had to ask one of the other mums to translate as the teachers don’t speak any English at all. When trying to get anything done over here (including sorting out our internet connection) life will just be better if we can speak French, shit we live in France we really should make more of an effort.

I decided on my action steps and benchmarks for my 90-day goal setting process that I use with all of my coaching clients and set the action plan for the first 30 days was to:

Listen to French lesson audiobook while running for at least 3 x a week

Listen to French radio and also pay attention to listen to other French conversations

Each day discuss new words with clayton and what he has learnt at school

The second one is actually working on building Claytons confidence as well as my own.

Pretty simple steps right??

I also set my 30-day benchmark as being able to ask for basic things and understand more.

So I practiced my simple action steps and this week 2 things happened!!

One, went into a shop and ordered a pain of glass. I got what I wanted, said all of my please, thank you’s and how much is that? I felt bloody proud.

Second our Nounou asked me something, and I got the jist of what she was talking about. Whooop Whoop!!!

These may sound a little silly and simple to you, but to me who has been scared of trying, scared of looking stupid, wanting to revert back to my shy old self that is afraid to do things, these were BIG wins and damn it I’m going to celebrate them.

You see confidence comes from practicing the little things, doing them consistently and then recognising and celebrating the wins.

It gives you a buzz, that feeling of being able to take things in your stride, what I like to call finding your flow.

Are things always going to work out well?? Course they aren’t!! I actually walked out of the petrol station with my head in my hands after saying Merci Cobou instead of Merci Boucoupe, I know what a fucking moron!!!

And before any of you tell me I have spelt it wrong, don’t even get me started. I can barley spell in English, I have no chance of being able to spell in French, ha ha!

Being able to laugh at yourself also helps build those confidence muscles too!! Coming face to face with what’s the worse that can happen is also a good thing. Because you realise that all the fears you had been building up in your head are not so bad after all.

And these same principals can be applied to anything. It’s how I went from being the shy one to being able to stand up and speak in front of 100’s of people and actually feel good about doing it. It’s how I gained the confidence to set up and create my own fitness business from scratch.

Weather you are scared of going to the gym for fear of looking stupid, fear of going on another date in case you get hurt again, scared of going for a new job or career direction in case it doesn’t work out, it all works the same.

Because you own self confidence will become your super power, it’s where you will find your flow with life, it’s never too late to become who you have always wanted to be and it starts with the smallest step.